1960
Duncan
1
When in his twenties a poetry's full strength
Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,
He let the divine prompting (come at length)
Rushingly bear him any way it would
And went on writing while the Ferry turned
From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,
And back again, and back again. He learned
You add to, you don't cancel what you do.
Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled,
His own lines carrying him in a new mode
To ports in which past purposes unravelled.
So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode,
Whatever his first plans that night had been,
The energy that rose from their confusion
Became the changing passage lived within
While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion.
2
Forty years later, and both kidneys gone;
Every eight hours, home dialysis;
The habit of his restlessness stayed on
Exhausting him with his responsiveness.
After the circulations of one day
In which he taught a three-hour seminar
Then gave a reading clear across the Bay,
And while returning from it to the car
With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady
Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell
—Fell he said later, as if I stood ready,
"Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn."
Well well,
The image comic, as I might have known,
And generous, but it turned things round to myth:
He fell across the white steps there alone,
Though it was me indeed that he was with.
I hadn't caught him, hadn't seen in time,
And picked him up where he had softly dropped,
A pillow full of feathers. Was it a rime
He later sought, in which he might adopt
The role of H.D., broken-hipped and old,
Who, as she moved off from the reading-stand,
Had stumbled on the platform but was held
And steadied by another poet's hand?
He was now a posthumous poet, I have said
(For since his illness he had not composed),
In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread
Was closure,
his life soon to be enclosed
Like the sparrow's flight above the feasting friends,
Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light,
Beneath the long roof, between open ends,
Themselves the margins of unchanging night.
Translation from Italian & Commentary by Peter Valente
[These poems are part of a sequence whose central focus is Pasolini’s love for the young actor Ninetto Davoli. They are selected from the 112 works that exist in various states of draft and revision, most of them written during the filming of the “Canterbury Tales” in England and completed on Pasolini’s return to Italy. The last poem in the sequence is dated “February 1973.”]
1/
Your place was at my side,
and you were proud of this.
But, sitting with your arm on the steering wheel
you said, “I can’t go on. I must stay here, alone.”
If you remain in this provincial village you’ll fall into a trap.
We all do. I don’t know how or when but you will.
The years that comprise a life vanish in an instant.
You are quiet, pensive. I know it is love
that is tearing us apart.
I have given you
all the power of my existence,
yet you are humble and proud, obeying a destiny
that wants you to remain impoverished. You don’t know
what to do, whether to give in or not.
I can’t pretend your resistance
doesn’t cause me pain.
I can see the future. There is blood on the sand.
Canterbury
2/
I think of you and I say to myself: “ I have lost him.”
I cannot bear the pain and wish I were dead. A minute
or so passes and I reconsider. With joy
I take back strength from your image. I refuse to cry.
My mind is changed.
Then again I consider you, lost and alone.
Who is this ugly gentleman
who does not understand what concerns him most? Are you
or are you not this Other,
he who always loses without really dying?
He is my double: I, pedantic. He, informal.
Knowledge of him has changed everything in my life.
He says that if I am lost he will find me.
He knows that when he does I will be dead.
Bath, October 24, 1971
3/
That Freud that you enjoy reading doesn’t
clarify what I desire. You came here,
and I repeat –Nothing binds you to me.
Yet you decide to stay.
The man who prays and does not feel shame, who desires
his mother’s nest for comfort, will lead a false life.
A desolate life. You will deny this.
But remember his cry is not for you.
It is for his own ass.
You came to teach me things I had not known before
but the angel appears and you are silent again.
He is soon gone. And still you are anxious.
Pleasure suspends my anguish.
But I know afterwards regret will shatter our fragile peace.
4/
There existed in this world a thing without price.
It was unique. Few were aware of it.
No code of the Church could classify it.
I confronted it midway on life’s journey
with no guide to lead me through this hell.
In the end there was no sense in it
tho it consumed the whole of my reality.
You wanted to destroy any good that came from it,
slowly, slowly, with your delicate hands.
You were not devoted and yet I cannot understand
why there was so much fury in your soul
against a love that was so chaste.
Benevento, Feb. 3, 1973
5/
The wind screamed through the Piazza dei Cinquecento
as in a Church –there was no sign of filth.
I was driving alone on the deserted streets. It was almost 2 am.
In the small garden I see the last two or three boys,
neither Roman nor of the peasantry, cruising for
1000 lire. Their faces are stone cold. But they have no balls.
I stopped the car and called out to one of them.
He was a fascist, down on his luck, and I struggled
to touch his desperate heart.
But in the dark I could see himwatching me.
You have come with your car and had your fun, Paolo.
The degenerate individual was here next to you. He is your double.
Cheap stolen trinkets hang from his car window.
Now you must leave
but where can you go? He is always there.
NOTE. Giovanni (“Ninetto”) Davoli was born on October 11, 1948 in San Pietro a Maida, Calabria. During the shooting of “La Ricotta” (1963), he was introduced to Pasolini. He was fourteen years old. Pasolini had just turned forty. Pasolini wrote, “Everything about him has a magical air…an endless reserve of happiness.” Soon Ninetto became part of Pasolini’s entourage and began appearing in his films. He was first cast in “The Gospel According to St. Mathew” (1964) and appeared in many others films culminating with “The Arabian Nights” in 1974. He has said of his relationship to Pasolini, “In me, he found the naturalness of the world he knew growing up.” This was the world that Pasolini saw devastated and ultimately obliterated by the changes that Italy was undergoing in the 60s.
Ninetto told Pasolini, during the filming of the “Canterbury Tales”, that on his return to Rome he intended to marry. Pasolini writes, “I am insane with grief. Ninetto is finished. After almost nine years, there is no more Ninetto. I have lost the meaning of my life…Everything has collapsed around me.” In January 1973, Ninetto married. He promised Pasolini that nothing fundamental would change as a result of his marriage. But Pasolini was inconsolable.
The poems begun on August 20, 1971 chart the series of emotional upheavals Pasolini underwent during the time leading up to and after the wedding. He writes that Ninetto “is tired of our relationship. It has lost / all sense of novelty for him. The duty of a new life / distracts him.” He writes of Ninetto’s fiancée , “She blamed you for your innocent abandonments…She wants everything./ She is desperate and without hope, / without any compassion.” In another poem he accuses Ninetto, “This love/ does not glorify you. It humiliates you. /…You love her only if she weeps and is humiliated./You don’t know how to maintain her / nor do you really want to.” His anger turns to regret: “But you, so happy, you/ the very image of happiness, now/ that you are gone from my life.” Finally his anger subsides and he writes on February 1, 1973, “But seeing that you have retained a little love for me / exclusively, this means everything.” Pasolini’s relationship with Ninetto had changed into something else. Desire had given way to affection and loyalty. Pasolini cast him as Aziz in the “Arabian Nights,” a character he described as “joy, happiness, a living ballet.” Ninetto’s first son was named Pier Paolo.
Peter Valente